Fedora Core 4 Test 2--Plenty to Look Forward to in FC4 - page 3

Looking Forward

April 25, 2005

By
Bill von Hagen

Fedora Core 4 Test 2 brings lots of goodies to Linux users
everywhere. Not only does it provide the latest versions of GNOME
(2.10) and KDE (3.4.0) for desktop users regardless of your political
persuasion, but it also includes a preliminary version of GCC 4.0 for
the developers among us. Since GCC 4.0 was officially released in late
April, I'm sure that the official release of FC4 will include GCC 4.0,
which promises to be a true milestone for GCC, as it introduces a new
optimization framework that promises better and higher-performance
code than ever before.

The following table shows the versions of some of the most popular
GNU/Linux software packages found in the Fedora Core 4 Test 2
release. Of course, updates to almost everything in this list are
already available, as discussed later in this review. For those new to
Linux, this table lists the versions of the Evolution mail client, the
binutils, GCC, GDB, and Glibc packages for compilation and debugging,
the GNOME desktop system and its graphical underpinnings in the X
Window System, the Perl, Python, and Ruby scripting languages, the
Open Office desktop office software package, the Linux kernel
itself, and the yum and RPM package management systems.

Package

Version

binutils

2.15.94.0.2.2-1

Evolution

2.2.2-1

Firefox

1.0.3-2

GCC

4.0.0-1

GDB

6.3.0.0-1.15

GIMP

2.2.6-1

Glibc

2.3.5-1

GNOME

2.10.0-2

KDE

3.4.0-5

Kernel

2.6.11-1.1226_FC4SMP

Open Office

1.9.93-1

Perl

5.8.6-5

Python

2.4.1-1

RPM

4.4.1-9

Ruby

1.8.2-7

X Window System

6.8.2-27

yum

2.3.2-1

As you can see from this list, it doesn't get much more up-to-date
unless you roll your own Linux.

Figure 4 shows the default FC4T2 desktop after logging in. As you
can see from this figure, there are some fundamental changes to the
menu layout used by GNOME 2.10, which (among other things) has broken
the contents of the old Computer menu into two menus: Places (which
deals with access to folders, devices, and so on) and Desktop (which
deals with general desktop-related tasks such as administration,
setting preferences, locking the screen, logging out, and so
on). IMHO, the new GNOME menu organization is an improvement to
previous GNOME menu layouts. YMMV. Flames cheerfully ignored.

One bizarre thing about the FC4T2 release. The first time I select any
of the menus from the top of the screen, there's a delay of 10 or so
seconds until any selected menu displays. I saw this on several test
installs, and at first thought that GNOME 2.10 was doing some weird
menu computation. However, I didn't see this on other GNOME 2.10
systems such as Ubuntu's 5.04 (Hoary) release, and therefore think
that this is just a bug waiting to be fixed.